Mario Gas is an actor, a theatre and opera director, but also a zarzuela director (in January he will restage Los gavilanes at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid), a genre of musical theatre for which he has great affection and passion. This is not surprising if we consider that Mario Gas was born in Montevideo during the tour (of more than a year!) of his parents' company through Latin America. Hence the title of the show La nit és blanca, muy blanca..., which he premiered at La Fàbrica with the fragment of the romance Despierta negro from La tabernera del puerto by Maestro Sorozábal, which his father sang when he was born. A declaration of intent, moreover, playing with Catalan and Spanish in a show that looks back without nostalgia, evoking those poetic voices that have been part of his life.

Peeping Tom was a dance-theater company with two co-directors working together: the Argentine Gabriela Carrizo and the Frenchman Frank Chartier. It remains a dance-theater company, but each show is commanded by one of the two creators and founders. Two years ago we saw the most theatrical version of Peeping Tom at the Sala Gran of the TNC (S 62°58’, W 60°39’) where the physical, almost acrobatic dance that characterized the company's proposals, had practically disappeared.

I don't know if Jordi Oriol, one of the most original creators of Catalan theatre, knows the work of the linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure, but his theatre in general and in particular L'últim àtom make me think so, because he uses linguistic games that alter the meaning of signs and words, illustrating the principle of linearity of the signifier and achieving surprising and humorous results. This is evident, for example, in the pronunciation (the speech) of the title of the show if we connect the two words or, more naively, if we consider the presumed and unknown actress Lara Segur, with phonetics that recall the name and surname of another well-known actress, who will not appear on stage and will be replaced by a supposed director: the actor Rubèn Ametllé. There is much more on the old green blackboard of the language teacher Mia Esteve, who plays with signifiers and signifieds and who replicates the mathematical formulas of professor Joan Carreras on another blackboard, where, talking about quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat, she posits the principle of observation as an international virus that threatens humanity. The professor and teacher are separated parents of a daughter who disappeared ten years ago, whose anniversary is approaching. She is joined by a Spanish-speaking army general, a priest, a mother in a wheelchair, a police inspector, the mother's lover, a theatre student, and a president who doesn't arrive... characters who inhabit a well-posed story but not so well resolved in the construction of a dramaturgy that is a victim of the same flexible and intuitive structure with which it is presented to us.

Carme Riera won the Sant Jordi prize (2003) with La meitat de l'ànima, an intrigue novel for which Ramon Simó and Magda Puyo have created a very fluid stage version, overcoming the difficulties inherent in a highly literary story, linked to the anti-Francoism of the fifties and sixties and anchored in public figures such as writers Albert Camus and Jorge Semprún, the anarchist and maquis Quico Sabaté, and the leader of the Lliga and former minister of Alfonso XIII Josep Bertran Musitu, who are only references for generations who already comb white hair.

The mother and son who star in this Denmark by Lluïsa Cunillé, published in 2017 (Arola Editors) but written in 2014 — when the Spanish king abdicated to evade responsibilities with the Treasury—, are the author's classic everyday characters: nameless people who drag themselves through life expecting almost nothing from it. Cunillé mirrors them without explicitly stating it in Shakespeare's great tragedy, Prince Hamlet and his mother Gertrude. A mother and son in a humble little house in Copenhagen with a bourgeois theatre sofa in the middle and flies (something smells rotten). She sleeps in front of the television and the son arrives.

Here is a play that is a challenge both for the audience and for the British playwright Ella Hickson when she was commissioned by the Almeida Theatre in London to write a play with total freedom. Hickson took it very seriously, letting out the conflicts that, as a playwright, she has to face in a British theatrical system increasingly focused on profitable proposals that have little or no impact on the real world.

The bottles of Fanta lemon on the tables at the usual refreshment offered by the Lliure after premieres were very suitable for this school-like proposal well conducted by an empathetic Olga Onrubia, chorus leader and guide of an entertaining look at Sophocles' classic but lacking the necessary pathos. It is a proposal that Andrea Jiménez's direction has populated with occurrences with little dramatic justification, such as replacing the old blind Tiresias with a girl heir to his power of prediction, reducing the character of Eurydice to nothing, or treating an Ismene dressed by her worst enemy as an actress who doesn't know what play she's in.

If wise is a person with deep and extensive knowledge about the topics they speak or write about, there is no doubt that Xavier Albertí is a wise man of theater and music. Who was director of the Grec Festival (1996-1999) and the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (2013-2021), colleague of Lluïsa Cunillé in the company La Reina de la Nit and director of small theater gems on texts by Harold Pinter, Thomas Bernhard, Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, until now had only flirted with acting, almost always in front of a piano, or cross-dressed as the Polish director Wanda Pitrowska for the premiere of L’aplec del Remei, by Josep Anselm Clavé in 2016 at the TNC, but had never achieved such prominence as in this Beethoven with a clear enough title.

It is very unusual for the great Greek classics to appear on the Barcelona theatre scene (the last one, I think, was Èdip directed by Oriol Broggi at the Romea with Julio Manrique in the lead role in 2018).'Èdip directed by Oriol Broggi at the Romea with Julio Manrique in the lead role in 2018). Hence the expectation surrounding Carlota Subirós's proposal, which brings together the three tragedies of Sophocles in a single performance in the natural order of events and not of writing, since Èdip a Colonos, the least performed worldwide, is the last but fits perfectly between the two most frequently staged: Èdip rei and Antígona. It fits but its lesser interest and lack of theatricality compared to the magnificent impact of the other two is clear.

Stuntmen, otherwise called specialists or action doubles, are those performers who either substitute for the protagonists in dangerous scenes or are cinematic victims of the violence exerted upon them. Of violence goes this supposed opera by Nao Albet and Marcel Borràs

Cabosanroque's theatre (Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut) has eluded theatrical conventions by moving towards visual and sonic proposals that are very difficult to classify. A performative theatre that develops musicovisual artefacts playing with tempos and metrics, with sound and silence in fully contemporary scores and scenic spaces of strong plasticity. In their creative territory there is a deliberate absence of literature, although they have made shows about Verdaguer, Rodoreda and Brossa with little human presence. This changes in Mil tres, say cheese, a kind of stimulating contemporary opera based on the character of Don Juan and the music of Mozart.

Education is not only one of the main topics of public policies, subject to too constant changes that do not facilitate the functioning of schools and end up negatively influencing children's academic results. It is also a troubling problem that all parents face when they have to decide where and how to guide their sons' or daughters' education with the hope that whoever gets it right guesses it.

The historical novel or false biography of the Roman emperor Hadrian is the best-known and most-read book by the Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar. The novel was adapted for the stage by the Italian director Maurizio Scaparro in 1989 and a few years later it was seen in the Castilian version by Julio Cortázar, also directed by Scaparro, at the Teatre Grec in Barcelona. Now the show returns to the stage with a dramatization by Brenda Escobedo and with the fantastic starring role of Lluís Homar, for whom the part is a perfect fit. Hadrian/Yourcenar's reflections on politics, wars, beauty, and death compose a human fresco that the virtuous Lluís Homar conveys, combining delicacy with depth, confidence with tender melancholy. 

You have to warm up before you start. And if you're warming up, you'd better keep warming up because if you stop, you'll have to start all over again. And that's always difficult. So says the flamenco dancer Rocío Molina, and that's why, while the audience sits in their seats and chats away, she exercises on a mat in the middle of the empty stage. And that's why, after two hours of a high-heeled spectacle, after the greeting from the rest of the company and a resounding applause with the entire audience on their feet and reluctant to leave, she will continue tapping her heels while the music plays.Achilipú by Dolores Vargas, La Terremoto.

Sol Picó closes a chapter with her first show in the Sala Gran of the Teatre Nacional. A show that is a farewell or, as she says, a transformation. And it arrives with a personal apocalypse full of strength, dedication, and magnificent choreography.

Tender It's a kind of striptease The emotional space between a couple of artists. "You take up more space," Judit Colomer tells Pau Vinyals. And it's true. He's the table and she's the chair in the living room, we're told. That may or may not be the case in their actual home, but it certainly is in the shared experience of this creative performance they both produced. Perhaps it's because she's a good set designer but a debut actress, while he's a good actor with a notable career. Perhaps it's because she's more emotionally grounded and mature, while he's more playful, outgoing, funny, and likes to bare his soul and show off his underwear. Perhaps it's because, ultimately, he represents the eternally dominant baron who explains how they met without her saying a word, and when she wants to speak, he constantly interrupts her. Perhaps it's because he needs to explain his bisexuality to himself and to us.

An inevitable reminder of a rather significant performance in the history of the Teatre Lliure and a proposal for the future with a young company. The Night of the Tribades (that is, lesbians) premiered in 1978 under the direction of Fabià Puigserver and with Anna Lizaran, Quim Lecina, Domènec Reixach and Muntsa Alcañiz, who attended the premiere of the new proposal at the romantic Teatre de Sarrià and who at the end of the performance received a flower from the director, Oriol Broggi

French director Séverine Chavrier, whom we met four years ago with And the new ones where I forgot (the adaptation ofThe lime kiln Thomas Bernhard's play), has returned to the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. And it has done so with a very free adaptation of one of William Faulkner's most celebrated but also most complex works, Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner narrates the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a poor Mississippi boy in the early 19th century who achieves wealth and becomes a slave-owning tyrant in his quest for social recognition.

Heimpossible It is the word Tiago Rodrigues uses to designate the indefinable but real geographical space into which humanitarian workers venture. A space opposed to possible...which is where they come from and where they return at the end of each mission, and is the space where we inhabitants of the First World live.

Joel Juan was crying. He was crying as he said hello. Tears brought on, we don't know, by Sonia's final monologue about boundless resilience and faith in the afterlife, or by the emotional release he felt after an hour and a half journey with the eight characters of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov.